Icarus Wind
by Ruadhnait
Summary: Caranthir's death, and an epilogue, told from Maglor's perpective. Kind of gratuitous.
1. Chapter 1

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**Icarus Wind**

**A/N: **Caranthir's death, and an epilogue, told from Maglor's perspective. Rather gratuitous.

**I. **

Carnistir. I cannot find Carnistir.

Most of those still in Menegroth are the bloody corpses strewn in every room, like toys thrown aside by a careless child. Tyelkormo is dead, and Curufinwë, and I do not want Carnistir to be dead too. I do not want anyone of them to be dead. But I think that we have come so far that our wishes do not matter anymore.

He is alone, alone with his fallen enemies in a ring around him, his sword shattered, a knife in his gut. He lies uneasily, legs twisted beneath him and his face turned to one side. And yet those storm-grey eyes are alive, defiantly alive; his chest still rises and falls, he's still with me, not gone, not yet.

I kneel beside him, pulling his head into my lap. He finds my hand and grips it with surprising strength for a dying man. "So you're here, Káno." It's his voice, Carnistir's voice, if ragged and hoarse.

I find my own voice somewhere. "I'm here," I say, roughly. "I won't leave you." I brush his hair away from his face. The crust of dried blood on his face cracks a little, his teeth show; he is making a last attempt to smile.

"No," he says, gentler this time, "no, you won't." It fades to the faintest of whispers, and I feel him slipping away from me, slipping from my grasp, already ceasing to be a fleshly thing. His eyes drift closed.

And then they snap open again suddenly. I'm pinned by his gaze, so strong for a dying man. Carnistir always was a fighter. "Find them," he whispers, in that ragged tone. "Find our brothers." I know what he means. We've come too far together, we the seven, to end like this, picked off one by one by the hand of Death. It was not supposed to end this way.

"I will, brother," I whisper, stroking his hair with my one free hand. "I will."

His gaze shifts, to the room around us. "I killed them," he says finally. "I brought them to ruin, just like Tyelko said we would."

"The victory's ours, Moryo," I say. "Yours. It's your victory."

"Tell Tyelko," he whispers. "He'll be proud." I cannot, of course, because Tyelkormo is dead, lost to us, gone where all pride in our achievements has, I think, deserted him.

He dies a moment later, his hand still in mine. I stay crouched in that position for some time, still searching desperately from some final flicker of life, until I have the decency to close those staring eyes and struggle to my feet.

I wish there had been more between us at the last. I did not even tell him that I loved him, that he fought bravely. I wish there had been more between us in life, less bitterness and silent anger.

He died begging me- begging us- to stay together.

The scream tears free from my throat a moment later, and my fist hits the wall with a dull thud that echoes and re-echoes, fading into silence.

My remaining brothers will come, bringing news of death, and loss. There'll be three biers, but one pyre, for that one fire of which we are all made.

I am sick, so damn sick, of life, of death, of watching your family die, your kingdom fall, and struggling on with shattered hearts without them.

**II.**

…and yet when you watch your family die, your kingdoms fall, your people fade, and finally become the last of your kind in Arda, you begin to realize that any good you might have done, any sincere wish, ceases to have any importance at all.

He died. They all did. By fire and sword. By their own actions, and that black and heavy hand of fate crushing, crushing us down. Always.


	2. Chapter 2

**II. Maedhros**

_Doriath fell on a bright day, I remember, in the early morning hours the sky was as clean and fresh as the petals of a flower._

_ It was over piteously soon on that clear, bright day. Menegroth was a wasteland of blood and corpses and the surrounding woods still smoldering by the time the evening was darkening in the west._

_ I found Makalaurë still kneeling by Carnistir's body, his eyes trained rigidly on his brother's pale and bloodied face. I remember pulling him gently to his feet, feeling his form, so light, so alarmingly frail, against mine, his facepressed against my shoulder. I could hear his dry and muffled sob as I gently eased the spear out of Carnistir's stomach. I straightened Carnistir's twisted form, folded his limp fingers around the hilts of his shattered sword, lifted him into my arms, willing my maimed right arm to somehow support him._

He is not light, my brother, and the slow walk back through the winding blood-slick halls of Menegroth leaves me winded.

Amras has been building the pyre. Tyelkormo is there, still lying curled as he used to sleep with his head against Huan's flank (but, of course, there is no dog), his face beneath the splattered blood indescribably, impossibly peaceful, as indeed he were asleep… (but, of course, he is not.) Curufin is there too, body twisted in the exquisite pain in which he must have died. The archers had no mercy for him, and shot him through even after he was down. _O my brothers_, I think numbly as I lay Carnistir down beside them. _I am sorry_.

Amras hands me the torch. I watch it smolder, burn for a minute, until the wind sends the smoke into my face, and, eyes stinging, I throw it gently onto the pyre. It is not the custom of the Eldar to burn the bodies of their dead, as the spirits must have a home to return to when Mandos releases them from his halls, but it is not so for our House; we are fated to remain there until the end of the world. I realize that I am only again dooming my brothers to remain discarnate, but somehow I cannot quell the small blasphemous voice somewhere within me: _he cursed them, let him raise them, if he so wishes_.

I stare at the fire for a while, the flames leaping up to the sky and licking at the bare overhanging branches, the three bodies, dark in the heart of the blaze. The remnants of our men have assembled behind us, silent as ghosts. Amras stands beside me, the great emptiness behind his grey eyes all to familiar. We have deemed him mad since his twin was slain at Losgar, but perhaps he sees clearer than the rest of us.

Tyelko, Curvo, Moryo. Dead, I think, gone. Later, when the fire has died to ashes, we will leave the dead of Doriath to the wolves and the ghosts, and ride south again, and I must lock the doors to my brother's silent rooms for the last time, and I must remember Tyelkormo sparring with me almost laughing as though he had not a care in the world, but from somewhere within him Fëanor's fire burning in his eyes, remember him curled up by the hearth with Huan, his face inscrutable in the firelight. The way Curufinwë's mouth would quirk slightly in his moments of caustic sarcasm, his biting wit more often than not as his brothers' expense, but no treachery in him when he drew his sword and plunged into battle like it was the finest thing in the world, the look of triumph on his face even as they cut him down- _it is finished, Father_. Remember Carnistir, dark and brooding, the perpetual sullen silence that seemed to clothe him, the way his grim determination seemed to keep us all together, though the world fell and faded around us-

_Keeping us together. I thought that we controlled the Oath and the curse; we would always be Fëanor's sons, almost like one entity. Amrod had died at Losgar, but death had not seemed as real then, Míriel and Finwë and the dead of Alqualondë notwithstanding. That reality, I think, set in later. And we had our father, driving us on, his fire kindled in our swords, and it seemed that that great blaze of glory and vengeance would never end, not for us. Our father lives, even now, he lives wherever the Oath lives, within each of us, wherever greed and hatred set brother against brother and kinsman against kinsman._

_ It seems now that the Oath has taken on a life of its own, that now it drives us to slaughter, to ruin that we cannot escape._

_ Tyelko, Curvo, Moryo_

_ (o my brothers, I am sorry)_

_ They were not the first to fall before it. They will not, I think, be the last._


End file.
